Smog City Siren

I didn’t plan to stay in L.A.
But L.A. had other fucking plans.
She swallowed me whole and called it brunch.
Poured mimosas down my grief, licked the salt off my shame, and said, “You’re not going back like that.”

I showed up with a return ticket and enough internalized homophobia to qualify for mileage rewards.
Said I was just visiting.
Said I was “figuring it out”
Said maybe I’d kiss a girl if the lighting was bad and no one back home found out.
But West Hollywood is a goddamn lie detector.
And I flinched every time a woman looked at me too long.

And then I stopped flinching.
The first girl had eyes like “don’t start what you can’t finish.”
She kissed me like a protest sign.
Hard.
Fast.
Loud.
She called me baby and I forgot every exit strategy I ever had.

Next thing I knew, I was playing lesbian dodgeball with a sunburn and a hickey I didn’t remember earning.
My thighs bruised from barstools and bad decisions with great lighting.
My group chat a shrine of receipts and emergency glitter.

I got a tattoo on my wrist downtown
— a rainbow —
because I needed to remember
what it felt like to be on fire
and not apologize for it.

I called myself a siren because I was done being a lifeguard for everyone else’s comfort.
I wanted to drag men into the sea, then kiss their girlfriends under a disco ball and leave before last call.

I canceled my flight three times.
Each time, I lied.
“Family emergency.”
“Car trouble.”
“Spiritual crisis.”

Nah.
I just wasn’t ready to go back to pretending.

Back home, they said “you’ve changed.”
As if that’s an insult.
As if I didn’t crawl out of the closet with road rash and a neon halo and build a new version of myself from lip balm, trauma, and the soft hands of every girl who said “you’re safe here.”

I didn’t come to L.A. to find myself.
I came here to lose the version of me they kept trying to resurrect.

I didn’t come out.
I broke out.
Through fire.
Through freeway.
Through every little voice that said
“you’re too loud,” “too gay,” “too much.”

Bitch, I AM too much.
I’m an earthquake in platforms.
I’m a mood board made of smog and sweat and second chances.

I’m not your soft girl.
I’m not your straight girl.
I’m the problem and the prophecy.

So say it back:
Smog City Siren.

The girl who didn’t go home.
The girl who let L.A. chew her up and walked out
grinning,
sunburned,
and whole.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

This poem is based on real events. Real cancelled flights, real tattoos, real bruises from queer dodgeball, and real moments of becoming.

I came out as a lesbian in Los Angeles, a city that felt more like a mirror than a destination. Everything in this piece happened in some version of truth: I delayed going home, again and again, because I wasn’t ready to leave the version of me that was finally waking up. The one kissing girls with sunlight still on her face. The one who said “I want this life” and meant it.

Smog City Siren is a love letter to that chaotic, glitter-covered, feral-soft chapter of self-discovery.

It’s about what it means to come out not gently, but with flame, and to realize you’re not going back to the closet just because you packed light.